Re: 2.6.24-rc4-git5: Reported regressions from 2.6.23

Linus Torvalds
2007-12-09T18:42:00Z

On Sun, 9 Dec 2007, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> Great, make everyone else wait another three months for a working CD
> drive. The one off regression appears far less harmful than a revert.

Btw, Alan, that "math" is total and utter BULLSH*T, and you should know
that.

"The one off regression" is likely the tip of an iceberg. If something
regresses for one person, for that one person who tested and noticed and
made a bug-report, there's probably a thousand people who haven't even
tested the development kernel, or who had problems and just went back to
the previous version.

In contrast, reverting something will be guaranteed to not have those
kinds of issues, since the only people who could notice are people for who
it never worked in the first place. There's no "silent mass of people"
that can be affected.

This is why regressions are so important. They don't trump _everything_,
but basically ignoring and letting them slide is *much* more painful than
just reverting it.

The biggest reason to ignore a regression is if nobody can even figure
out where it came from, or reverting simply isn't an option for some
really deep and fundamental issue. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

So we should revert unless there is some known acceptable real fix.

Linus